The roots of The Nephiad extend back nearly forty-five years, to 1965 and the spring of my
senior year in high school, when my teacher assigned the class to read several sections of John
Milton's Paradise Lost. The bits came nowhere near representing the whole poem; indeed, the
selections covered only a few pages in our anthology, but that taste was enough.

I was hooked on Milton. Not merely for the grandeur of his language, which entranced me,
but for the depth of his ideas and the excitement of his theology.

I decided then and there to go on to graduate school after finishing college (with no clear
idea what that entailed), earn a doctorate in Milton studies (long before I had any accurate notion
of what a dissertation was or what a doctorate meant), and then spend the rest of my life
teaching Milton. And for the final ten years of my teaching career, I had achieved all three.